capes balance one
another, as in a scale of beauty: in Rubens the several objects are
grouped and thrown together with capricious wantonness. Claude has more
repose: Rubens more gaiety and extravagance. And here it might be asked,
Is a rainbow a picturesque or an _ideal_ object? It seems to me to be
both. It is an accident in nature; but it is an inmate of the fancy. It
startles and surprises the sense, but it soothes and tranquillises the
spirit. It makes the eye glisten to behold it, but the mind turns to
it long after it has faded from its place in the sky. It has both
properties, then, of giving an extraordinary impulse to the mind by the
singularity of its appearance, and of riveting the imagination by its
intense beauty. I may just notice here in passing, that I think the
effect of moonlight is treated in an _ideal_ manner in the well-known
line in Shakespear--

See how the moonlight _sleeps_ upon yon bank.

The image is heightened by the exquisiteness of the expression beyond
its natural beauty, and it seems as if there could be no end to the
delight taken in it.--A number of sheep coming to a pool of water
to drink, with shady trees in the background, the rest of the flock
following them, and the shepherd and his dog left carelessly behind,
is surely the _ideal_ in landscape-composition, if the _ideal_ has its
source in the interest excited by a subject, in its power of drawing the
affections after it linked in a golden chain, and in the desire of the
mind to dwell on it for ever. The _ideal_, in a word, is the height of
the pleasing, that which satisfies and accords with the inmost longing
of the soul: the picturesque is merely a sharper and bolder impression
of reality. A morning mist drawing a slender veil over all objects is
at once picturesque and _ideal_; for it in the first place excites
immediate surprise and admiration, and in the next a wish for it to
continue, and a fear lest it should be too soon dissipated. Is the Cupid
riding on a lion in the ceiling at Whitehall, and urging him with
a spear over a precipice, with only clouds and sky beyond, most
picturesque or _ideal?_ It has every effect of startling contrast and
situation, and yet inspires breathless expectation and wonder for the
event. Rembrandt's Jacob's Dream, again, is both fearful to the eye, but
realising that loftiest vision of the soul. Take two faces in Leonardo
da Vinci's Last Supper, the Judas and the St John: the one is all
stren